What was your operating system? I hope not WIN 98...

But your stuff is pretty much gone. You might send the HD to a recovery site, but stop trying to reinstall over your old stuff, because every time you do it lessens the chances of recovery.

Try this...
(link...)

So, first, when did reinstalling windows format a hard drive?

Since the innovation of Windows NT AS 3.1, pretty much. As you're installing, there's an option to "format using FAT" or "format using NTFS" which you might have missed.

I've used this utility with some success:

(link...)

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Dirty mouth language -- it's the new black.

Update: Also, the data was on our flash card but was deleted. Is that a better route?

For the pictures, yes.

Rescue Pro is damned good for this.

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1186)-RescuePro.aspx

I've used it on SD and CF cards from Lexar and SanDisk with good results.

____________________________

Dirty mouth language -- it's the new black.

Bummer. You already did what I would have suggested, i.e. getting an external USB housing and trying to read the drive. It would have been better if you had done that before trying to reinstall anything, but you have probably figured that out and it doesn't matter now.

What Andy said about trying to recover your flash card sounds like the best bet. I have never tried it, but I have heard it works in a lot of cases.

That's great news re. CompUSA being able to recover your photos. Glad you were able to get them back.

...and because I am so very bad at backing things up, I was ecstatic to learn about (link...)

on NPR last week. Apparently, they offer some of us a way to do this effectively and relatively cheaply.

Obviously it is too late for this to be helpful in this situation but, there are some LINUX distributions that offer a working OS on a CD. Knoppix is probably the most popular. If you downloaded and burned the CD and kept it around it would allow you to boot your box from the CD and then mount the hard drive and see what you can see and access. I don't think it will allow you to write to the harddrive. Modern LINUX is all about intuitive GUIs and is pretty easy to use.

CAFKIA

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It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
  - William G. McAdoo

This is a problem in the enterprise environment for us almost daily. People put files where they aren't backed up. Something craps out. then they wonder why we don't have some magic forensic tool to recover them. (We actually do, but those tools are licensed only for use on the servers, not the desktops.) To accommodate these eventualities, we always distribute new PCs with dual partitions - one for OS, and one for profiles, data, etc. This way, if the OS crashes, we can reinstall from a standard image, and the data is still intact. That's how I run my home server too, running mssql's data directory, inetpub, and all virtual directories from a data partition. This architecture saved me once when I tried to upgrade a box from 2000 to XP Pro and it wiped out the OS partition. Luckily the data was saved. Hindsight and all that, right? I guess what I'm sayin' is if you run a second partition, anything that isn't backed up probably won't be lost if you have an OS tank on you.